Thanks for
that (the intro) or the name of the person.
Welcome
everyone. I am SO happy and excited to be here. I love being in a room of
social workers and crazy enough I love talking about shame resilience- I do it
a lot. I am in private practice as Clinical Social Worker and shame resilience
is central to my counseling philosophy and lens. Shame gets in the way for a
lot of us and makes it harder for us to understand what’s really happening
underneath it—our feelings; where our boundaries are and so on. We need to
strip away that first layer of shame to make our way on other issues… and
actually truth be told, I just think of shame as a bull shit liar—because no
matter what, we are all worthy of love and belonging. And we’ll get to all
that.
I’ll just
tell you a little about me… well because when I’m in a workshop I like to know
who’s talking. I came up through social work. At 19 years old (untrained, clearly)
I drove kids and supervised parental visits on contract with Children’s
Services- I don’t know why anyone let me do that. Then I worked in group care
with adults with developmental delays while in university and group care with
youth between degrees- in the city with McMan and the old Bosco ranch. I worked
in Children’s services as a case manager and then studied the admin and
evaluation side of social work at University of Manitoba looking at the
integration of services for high risk kids across ministries.
Then I spent a
decade raising kids and working in reproductive health before going back to studying
to bring up my credentials to become as Clinical Social Worker. I’ve been in
private practice since 2012—growing my practice while under the supervision of
now my friend Karen Nielsen- social worker extraordinaire. [Who would have been in the audience and gone for lunch with me after.] :-(
The origin
of this talk came about 2 years ago when I was asked by Leanne Hilsen at the
University of Calgary, Edmonton Division to talk at the BSW Field Supervisors’
lunch. I’ve always been a big Brene Brown fan from the first viral TED talk in
2011 and Leanne knew that from my professional social media. And then Leanne
told me about this very cool social worker from Vancouver named Vikki Reynolds.
And here we are two full circles around the sun later and I spent the day in a
workshop with Vikki Renyolds yesterday and heard her speak this morning and I
am here talking on the same topic to you great people. [which of course didn't actually happen. FC!]
__________
So now I
want to get an idea of the social workers (both trained and untrained—some of
my best friends are people who were born to be social workers and never did get
the university training).
1 Who works directly with clients’ most
of their time?
2 Who has been in the social work field
for 1-5 years, including students; 5-10 years? More than 10 years?
3 Okay and where do we work? Large
cities- Edmonton, Calgary, Red Deer/ Lethbridge?
4 Who works in town settings?
5 And primarily rural settings?
6 And where do you go to work everyday?
Hospitals and Health care settings? Schools and universities? Children services? Government social services- city,
other provincial programs, federal? Non-profit agencies? Community social workers? Urban Core
Neighborhoods? What else do we call that—front
lines, in the trenches?
What have I missed?
And then “client issues”
(and I’m using that word because we have to have a way of talking
together today, but I don’t see it as us and them- because that’s a false
binary set up in the professionalization of the work and it’s distancing by its
nature. It’s also false to think that social workers don’t have similar
experiences as “clients” or are never “clients”.)
Who works with people experiencing:
Poverty- income instability; food insecurity; housing
insecurity or homelessness?
Mental illness including severe and persistent mental
illness?
Clients with a physical disability? Chronic Health Issue?
Criminal justice involvement?
Clients who struggle with one or more addiction.
Sexually exploited now or in the past?
Suffered from multiple adverse childhood events including
abuse, neglect or witnessing parents with an addiction, violence between them
or other issues like metal health/ criminal involvement or addictions?
Client’s who struggle with systemic discrimination and
oppression related to sex, race, gender identity, sexuality, ability, income
and socio-economic status.
And is it
fair to say that you all know who Brene Brown is? Our famous colleague—a social
worker from the University of Huston. She is a shame and vulnerability
researcher. She has a viral TED-X talk from 2010 and in 2012 she presented at
our ACSW conference in Edmonton. I’m a big fan. I was there at 7:30am and got
my picture taken with her. She’s written 6 books- most are best sellers and she
hangs out with Oprah now and has a Netflix special. And as of last week has a great podcast called Unlocking Us.
So today I
want to use some of her ideas about shame and vulnerability and how we rise up
when we struggle, fall or fail—and apply them to the work we do as social
workers.
-----
As social
workers we know that everyone has a story and in fact, a lot of what we do is
sit with people and listen to their story…. Where they have some from, where
they are now and what they might need to move forward in their own story.
And the
stories we hear are most often are stories of struggle and striving. And as
social workers the people we listen TO and work alongside OF, are those who are
marginalized from mainstream society—who often live with systemic
discrimination and oppression.
And I want
to acknowledge that many social workers live in this same way—with their own
experiences of systemic discrimination and oppression. There really is NO
us-and-them, but in a work context we take on the role of social worker and for
simplicity the person we are working with will be a “client” in the way we talk
today.
So our work
is messy people caring work and it’s often in a context that is filled with
social injustice. We have the people we work with and the context of their
lives, their lived experiences, their story and we have us—each of us as an
individual—and the context of our life, our lived experience, our story.
So before I
go into how hard our work can be and how natural it is that sometimes we
struggle or have difficult responses to our work, let’s first just orient to
our own story as it relates to social work.
Ok, so a
little housekeeping…. you’ll need a pen and something to write on and you’ll
also need a sharing partner for these next 3 little exercises. Please pick
someone you don’t know or don’t know very well. Not your best friend you came
in with and not someone you will see at work Monday morning. And can you do a
quick intro with each other, please? Name, where you’re from or where you work.
I work dyadically most of the time and so I lean towards the sharing in pairs over
other formats for reflection or sharing. Great!
You’re all great!
Coming into
your own story-- I want you to think about a couple of positive qualities that
you had as a child. How adults would have described you when you were a little
child—USING POSITIVE TERMS- think age 7, 8, 9, 10, 11—in there. How would the
adults at home or school describe what you were like. Take a minute to jot that
down. And now share that with your sharing partner.
Okay and now
take a minute to think about how those childhood qualities are potentially the
gifts that you bring to your work. And consider that these qualities (even if
they weren’t appreciated when you were little) are the gifts you share in your
best social working moments. Consider
how they connect for a minute--- And when you’re ready, share that with your
sharing partner.
AND NOW:
come back again. I want you to think about a recent positive interaction with a
client. Is there are highlight in the last week or month of being with a client
when you felt really good about it? What made it positive for you? Did you feel
a sense of connection? Did you feel a sense of shared humanity or deep
compassion for the client’s feelings or for their situation? Were you in awe of
their ability to get through their hard times? Their resilience or tenacity to
keep going? Perhaps talking with a client helped you put something in your life
in perspective?
So the
purpose of that is just to orient into yourself and how that’s related to your
professional role. It’s meant to be grounding into what we all love most about
our work and to remind us that what sets us up to fall or fail, is often NOT
our direct work with clients alone. And if you haven’t heard Vikki say this
already, she writes that most of use would say our interactions with clients
are actually challenging, inspiring and even transforming for us.
So now I
want to talk about what it feels like when we fall, we fail and we struggle.
You might have an experience to draw on—when you didn’t feel like a “good
social worker”- maybe in a conversation with a client or a co-worker/
supervisor or maybe just at the end of the day when you got home and had a
feeling of not being able to do it.
In Brene
Brown’s work, she says that the physics of vulnerability is such that if we are
brave enough often enough, we will fall. Its not IF we fall it’s when.
And social
workers, by our nature and our call to the profession is that we are people who
strive to live with an open heart—with what Brene Brown calls ordinary
courage—Ordinary courage is the ability to speak your mind with your heart—to
tell your whole story with your whole heart and that includes the part of the story
that has struggle in it.
Shame is
about the times when we don’t feel worthy of love and belonging, and we hide a
part of our story instead of stepping into the vulnerability it takes to own
stories of struggle.
Shame is the
feeling of being seen as failing or falling. Shame in part is a feeling like we
are powerless—that is that we can’t make change happen—and as social workers
(and this would be true of other helping professionals as well) we are very
hard on ourselves when we fail, fall and struggle. We don’t like a feeling that we can’t make
change happen.
We know or
we believe that when the people we work with struggle we will be there with
compassion and empathy, but when we struggle, typically we are not as forgiving
with our own selves.
And if
you’ve ever heard Brene Brown say: you can only be as empathetic to others as
you have compassion for yourself, as a social worker you probably thought,
that’s a lie. I’m very good at showing
up for others, I’m just hard on myself. But what we know, is that if we don’t
practice self-compassion, we are not able to show up emphatically. In fact,
we risk thinking in us and them terms—there are people who need help and there
are people who do the helping—and remember we already said that’s not only unnecessarily
distancing and relationship damaging, it’s actually threatens how we hold our
personal values and professional ethics.
Courage,
compassion, connection help us to overcome experiences of shame. Empathy is the
antidote to shame and even if as a group we are good at doing it for others we
have to work on how we cultivate self-compassion. If we don’t, we will stay
isolated and insulated from connection—and then shame grows.
So a couple
of quick things about shame:
Shame is
different from guilt. Guilt is I made a mistake and I should make amends. I
step on your foot, I have some guilt- I’m sorry are you okay? Guilt is healthy
and adaptive in relationships. Shame is different. Shame is the feeling that I
am a mistake. There is something wrong with me. I’m not good enough.
The three
things about shame: we all have it, we all hate talking about it, the less we
talk about it the more it affects us.
Shame is
organized differently for men and women, but it feels the same in our body.
(quick side note- it’s not as gendered as this- but for the bulk of each gender
there are differences that emerged from Brene Brown's original research)—most often for women
shame is a web of competing conflicting
expectations and a feeling of not being able to meet all the expectations. For
men, Brene Brown (and others) talk about it as a box- with a limited definition
of masculinity—where if you express emotion or vulnerability, you are weak. I
appreciate that one may be more based in feminine ideals and masculine ideals,
but I have definitely met men who struggle with competing expectations and
women who were raised to see vulnerability as weakness—especially in
masculine-feeling organizational settings. So let’s say its feminine/ masculine
ways of organizing shame and not necessarily men and women per se.
And in the
original research Brene Brown found there are 12 different categories where we
can feel shame—today we are focusing on one- related to work. Some of the other
12 areas include: appearance and body image; past trauma; being labelled and
stereotyped; family of origin; mothering/ fathering; physical and mental
illness, including addiction. Some of these, like mothering or trauma can be
minefields of shame triggers.
You’re all
with me--- ok, breathe. Just talking about shame can be inherently shame
triggering, but we’re going to move through it together.
That’s what
shame resilience is: the capacity to recognize shame when we experience it and
move through it in a constructive way that allows us to maintain our authenticity
and grow from our experiences.
These are
the 4 steps to shame resilience:
1. Recognizing shame triggers
2. Practicing critical awareness
3. Reaching out
4. Calling shame by its name
So first we
have to recognize our shame triggers and we have to know what shame looks like
or feels like for us, individually. Often our first response to shame is
involuntary and it happens in a millisecond- our brain tells us to either freeze,
runaway or fight and defend. In social circumstances, that means we will move
away, move toward or move against. These are shame screens- it’s what we do to
hide our shame and distract others from seeing it.
Moving away
is withdrawing and being secret and silent about the experience. We are likely
to go numb out with food, wine or beer, shopping, on-line games or social
media….
Moving
toward is when we are hustling to people please the people we are with—we do
this so that we can still feel as though we belong to them. Hard core people
pleasing isn’t something social workers would know much about (Haha).
And moving
against is when we take the uncomfortable feeling of shame and discharge it
outward into blame. We try to gain power over others by being aggressive or
trying to control the situation (and we often reserve this one for the people
we love the most).
So if we can
catch ourselves in a reaction like this, those millisecond shame screens and we
can stop and say—ahhh…. Here is a shame trigger. If we can get curious about
what’s going on (emotionally, in our bodies and in our thoughts) it’s like
collecting data about ourselves. If we can understand ourselves better, we can
grow toward our wholeness. And to do this, we need to be able to hold
self-compassion—otherwise we just shame spiral. Or if that’s a hard word to
hold on to, simply self-acceptance. SEE my self struggling, acting out,
withdrawing and on the other side, hold some self-acceptance and
self-compassion—ahh, there I am being a messy imperfect human.
Shame
triggers are often related to unwanted identities relative to our idealized
identities. This applies to any of the shame trigger areas- my desired
identities in how I want others to see me or how I want to see myself—as a
mother, in my appearance, in my mental health… and we are using work here.
So lets see
if we can do this as a large group—what are our idealized identities as social
workers… how do we want to see ourselves?
When I think
of us as a collective group, I think some our desired identities include: Being
tough- we can handle it; we are resilient and can bounce back; we are also empathetic,
we can help, we can make change happen.
And we are professional. We are able to talk about our clients and their
experiences with a bit of emotional distance.
What are the
unwanted identities?
I think they
include being seen as weak, affected by our work; not able to handle it,
judgmental (or non-empathetic), CAN’T make change happen, powerless, too
emotional, too attached, NOT rational in the way we communicate.
Unwanted
identities dictate our behavior every day. They do this because we work hard to
show only the desired identities and then we don’t share what’s going on behind
that.
But it’s
worth it to figure out these desired and unwanted identities because the
perceptions we have and how we want to avoid them are totally unrealistic and
they give us little room to be messy imperfect humans.
That’s one
step in shame resilience—recognizing shame triggers.
Another step
is practicing critical awareness. That’s when we step back to see the context
of our experiences. So Brene Brown has a few questions related to critical
awareness that can be applied to any of the shame triggers areas—but I when I
thought about them in how they apply to us as social workers, I was blown away.
What are the
social or community expectations regarding this issue?
So thinking
about the expectations that we have on ourselves or others have on is in our
desired identities- tough, resilient, empathetic, but have some professional
distance. Able to make change happen and get things done.
And
expectations that we do more with less; do the impossible.
We aren’t
asked what we need or what resources our clients’ need, but get things done.
Who sets
these expectations?
They are
political and complex- connected to the government and funding. The
expectations are related to how society and the media understands (or doesn’t
understand or doesn’t even know about) the social issue in the areas where we
work… and of course, the social issues themselves are complex.
Who benefits
from these experiences?
That social
workers are tough and resilient… our employers. The government. The people who
want us to do more with less. The people
who wan to live with their privilege in action of never knowing how challenging
and unfair some people’s lives are. Those who don’t want to think about complex
social issues because they think someone else can do that- that person has a
social worker—they are fine.
When we work
with marginalized groups of people related to complex social issues, they are
not really understood. People understand the context of nurses and hospitals
and health care funding and will talk about that; or about teachers and
schools, but when it comes to talking about complex social problems and the
people affected by them, Joe Public doesn’t necessarily understand that. And
so, often there aren’t a lot of people in the conversations related to the
areas where we work. And they benefit by not having to personally address that
there are some very big injustices in our society We aren’t just the “good Canadians”
that have universal health care.
And this
dynamic further contributes to the feelings of isolation—we are the advocates
in our area of work and others look at us, like why is that a problem? That
doesn’t affect me.
(things like
systemic racism or child maltreatment or prostitution or the criminal justice
system… that isn’t about them).
Are these
expectations realistic? Do they conflict with each other?
No, they are
not realistic and yes, they do conflict with each other.
Does it make sense that we can always be tough and resilient
when we are also called to be present and empathetic with a client’s life
circumstances? How do we do our work with sensitivity to the social injustice
and then always stay non-emotional in our advocacy?
When we think
of these critical awareness questions about the times when we struggle, we must
understand the context of our work—that’s the task—broaden the lens that we are
using to look back on the times when we struggle or fall…
We work in
organizations without sufficient resources to address the social problem areas
where we work;
There simply
isn’t enough of us to go around’
We often
aren’t part of decision-making that takes place 4 steps above our pay grade and
it affects us and our clients.
We are often
subject to organizational change and restructuring without input…because the
systems we work in are political and affected by the politics of the day and
funding and so on.
We work with
some of the most complex social issues: homelessness, poverty, systemic racism,
trauma, child maltreatment, mental illness, aging, and many more… and we work
with people from vulnerable populations: Indigenous Canadians, new Canadians,
people marginalized through sexuality and gender, people who live with chronic
disease and disability…
So when I
was working on all of this.. what came to me was this moment: So when we are
tired and feel like “I’m not a good enough social worker”, why on God’s green
earth (as my mother would say) do we hold that experiences as an individual
pathology? What’s wrong
with me? I’m not good enough. I can’t do this. I’m not normal.
So critical
awareness is a practice of reality checking expectations. We need to
contextualize our personal experiences and see how the larger political,
economic and social forces shape those experiences and we need to
normalize—other social workers feel this too. If we don’t we will further
isolate ourselves or act-out.
The critical
awareness piece tells us: I am, you are, we are: messy imperfect humans trying
to get through some through some tough work on some tough days with competing
and conflicting expectations about what we’re supposed to do and how we’re
supposed to do that.
So we need
to demystify the experience of shame around our role as social workers. That
means we talk about it, share what we know with others and we learn more about
it. If we don’t demystify the idealized identities, then we reinforce shame
connected to the unrealistic expectations and continue to make exhaustion or burning
out an individual pathology.
Part of
demystifying idealized identities and this comes from Vikki Reynolds work is to
talk about doable job descriptions and cultivating a workplace that allows for
sustainability. What would it be like if there was a workplace expectation that
you take an hour for lunch every day. Or there was a walking club promoted by
your boss or a clinical support circle that was supported or paid for by your
employer.
So leads to
step 3 which is Reaching our to tell our story. (breathe) [my note to self. lol.]
We heal shame in our
connection to others. We know how to show up for our clients, but we typically
aren’t great at reaching our. And if we don’t share our own stories of
struggle, we wind up feeling separated from others and insulated from
connection. We have to create safe spaces for those honest conversations.
When we
fall, fail and struggle as social workers and that can include working against
our professional ethics or our personal values either because the political
structures around our work cause that OR because we make a mistake (I know,
imagine social workers make mistakes….) There are some very good, but sticky
conversations about how we work with clients, how people in our organizations
talk about clients and whether that fits with our collective ethics (which is
Vikki Reynolds work).
So what are
the barriers to reaching out?
One is a
sense of otherness: social workers re great at thinking our work is special. If
we think our area of work is special—we think we can’t have these conversations
with outside others. For example, people who work in the core neighborhoods
thinking people who work outside of that don’t get it; people who work in
hospitals close to critical illness, dying and death; or people who work with
child trauma and abuse. We set ourselves up for insulating and think others
can’t understand. It leads to working in silos.
That’s the
other thing that is a barrier to reaching out—we often work in places that have
a culture of scarcity. There isn’t enough of what we need… we talk about how
big were the crises and how frequent and in some work places self-neglect is a
badge of honor: I didn’t even have time to eat lunch. I didn’t even have time to pee.
This further
reinforces the idealized identities and doesn’t provide a space for shame
resilience (or for sustainability in our work).
We need to work
to shit our workplace culture so that there is room for these things. We need
to deconstruct work experiences of crises and talk through difficult ethical
issues as they arise.
We reach out
to others to help with the reality check, have honest conversations that have
space for empathy through the falling and rising process. We meet to talk about
our struggles—this feeling I’m not a good social worker—and also with
accountability to our ethics and our collective way of understanding our work.
And so that’s
the 4th step- speaking shame. It can be hard to define or describe
the feeling sometimes—because shame is a unique pain—but to speak shame means
that we can talk openly about our feelings and our needs.
So when we
have had a hard day and we might not recognize it, but there is a little shame
edge to how we are feeling, we go home and make the people closest to us guess
at what we need and then we blame them if we didn’t get it right.
If you don’t
ask for what you need, you will have to act out or shut down. You don’t have a
choice, you aren’t getting your needs met.
And this
often leads to making us feel worse and we get into that shame shit storm. So
we have to be able to speak our feeling and needs related to shame, yes, but
related to it all.
Really, to
be able to say this is how I am feeling, and this is what I need means that we
see ourselves as worthy of having those feelings understood and those needs
met.
So that’s
shame resilience: the capacity to recognize shame when we experience it and
move through it in a constructive way that allows us to maintain our
authenticity and grow from our experiences.
So to
wrap-up. Shame is the study of both the power of connection and dangers of
disconnection. We need to find ways to emphatically support one another when
we trip on shame triggers, fall, fail and struggle-- When we re not resilient
or tough or when we make mistakes or have tough ethical issues to deal with.
As Brene
Brown says, it’s being able to walk into our own stories of struggle—getting
curious about feelings and the associated thoughts and behaviors that help us
to own our story. I’ll end with a couple of Brene Brown quotes and then we’ll
open it up for the minutes we have left.
“The irony
is that we attempt to disown our difficult stories to appear more whole or more
acceptable, BUT our wholeness and even our wholeheartedness actually depends on
the integration of ALL our experiences, including the falls.”
than those of us who are willing to fall
because we have learned how to rise
With skinned knees and bruised hearts;
we choose owning our stories of struggle,
over hiding, over hustling, over pretending.
When we we deny our stories, they define us.
When we run from struggle, we are never free.
So we turn toward truth and look it in the eye.
We will not be characters in our stories.
Not villains, not victims, not even heroes.
We are the authors of our lives.
We write out own daring endings.
We craft love from heartbreak.
compassion from shame,
grace from disappointment,
courage from failure.
Showing up is our power.
Story is our way home. Truth is our song.
We are the brave and brokenhearted.
We are rising strong.
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